well-armed, lightly trained militia---
begins not in the Old West but in the
nineteen-seventies. For most of American
history, gun owners generally frowned
on the idea. In , the president of the
National Rifle Association, Karl Fred-
erick, testified to Congress, "I do not be-
lieve in the promiscuous toting of guns.
I think it should be sharply restricted
and only under licenses." In , after
a public protest by armed Black Pan-
thers in Sacramento, Governor Ronald
Reagan told reporters that he saw "no
reason why on the street today a citizen
should be carrying loaded weapons."
But the politics of guns and fear were
changing. In , Je Cooper, a fire-
arms instructor and former marine, pub-
lished "Principles of Personal Defense,"
which became a classic among gun-
rights activists and captured a genera-
tion's anxieties. "Before World War II,
one could stroll in the parks and streets
of the city after dark with hardly any
risk," he wrote. But in "today's world of
permissive atrocity" it was time to reëx-
amine one's interactions with fellow-
citizens. He ticked o the names of
high-profile killers, including Charles
Manson, and wrote of their victims,
"Their appalling ineptitude and timid-
ity virtually assisted in their own mur-
ders." Adapting a concept from the Ma-
rines, he urged civilian gun owners to
assume a state of alertness that he called
Condition Yellow. He wrote, "The one
who fights back retains his dignity and
his self-respect."
Soon armed citizens acquired a po-
litical voice: in , at the N.R.A.'s an-
nual meeting, conservative activists led
by Harlon Carter, a former chief of the
U.S. Border Patrol, wrested control from
leaders who had been focussed on
rifle-training and recreation rather than
on politics, and created the modern
gun-rights movement. In , the re-
fashioned N.R.A. successfully lobbied
lawmakers in Florida to relax the rules
that required concealed-carry applicants
to demonstrate "good cause" for a per-
mit, such as a job transporting large quan-
tities of cash.
Under the new "right to carry" laws,
which two dozen other states later
adopted, o cials had no choice but to
issue a permit to anyone who was "men-
tally fit" and had not been convicted
of a violent felony. Then the N.R.A.
set about extending the right to carry
into places that had remained o lim-
its, including bars, colleges, and
churches. Beginning this fall,Texas will
be the eighth state to allow students
and sta at public universities to carry
on campus. (A smaller movement ad-
vocates "open carry"---bearing uncon-
cealed weapons in public---but many
gun owners consider that option coun-
terproductive, because it repels mod-
erate allies.)
For gun manufacturers, the con-
cealed-carry movement was a lucrative
turn. In , the N.R.A.'s chief lob-
byist, Tanya Metaksa, said, "The gun
industry should send me a basket of
fruit." Small-calibre guns, like Gerald
Ung's . -calibre, had been regarded
as a joke. "They were called 'mouse cal-
ibres,' " Jannuzzo said. "People were
very disparaging." But, as states loos-
ened their laws, gunmakers marketed
those weapons as "true pocket guns,"
with "maximum concealability." Am-
munition companies reëngineered small
rounds to increase their velocity and
lethality. In , manufacturers pro-
duced nearly nine hundred thousand
. -calibre guns, more than in any
previous year, and a twenty-fold in-
crease since . In , twenty-six
per cent of gun owners cited personal
protection as their top reason for buy-
ing a gun; by , self-defense was
cited more than any other reason. "I
see grown men grab a . -calibre gun
out of the truck and put it in their pock-
ets," Jannuzzo said. "It's a whole new
world out there."
The Orlando massacre renewed calls
to restore a federal assault-weapons ban,
which expired in , given that mil-
itary-style rifles were used by killers in
Orlando, San Bernardino, at the Sandy
Hook Elementary school, and in Au-
rora, Colorado, among other places. But
in rifles accounted for just three
per cent of the more than eight thou-
sand gun homicides recorded by the
F.B.I. A ban would have a limited e ect
on gun-industry profits. The right-to-
carry movement, by unbridling the pres-
ence of firearms in American life and
erecting a political blockade against
e orts to qualify it, has transformed the
culture and business of guns.
The greatest legal and political ques-
tions around guns today are not what
types of weapons people will be allowed
to use in the future but who can use
them and why. On June th, a federal
appeals court in California sided with
gun-control advocates, ruling that local
governments can set conditions on the
right to carry concealed weapons. "This
is the beginning of a battle, not the
end," Adam Winkler, a specialist in gun
law at the University of California, Los
Angeles, said. The Supreme Court has
ruled that Americans have a right to
"self-defense within the home," but it
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 27, 2016
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